Classical music
Horatiu Radulescu
A Romanian-born composer, Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008) was a major figure of spectral music, a movement he helped make known through his radical approach to sound and harmony. Settled in Clarens and then in Vevey in the 1990s, he rests in the Clarens cemetery.
Horatiu Radulescu: the inventor of spectral sound, retired to Lake Geneva
Fleeing Romania
Born in Bucharest in 1942, Horatiu Radulescu learned the violin privately with Nina Alexandrescu, herself a pupil of Georges Enescu. But it was as a composer that he would mark his century.
In 1969, suspected by the communist regime of composing “imperialist music”, he left Romania for Paris. He would not return to his native country for twenty-three years.
Before Grisey and Murail
Radulescu is one of the fathers of spectral music, the movement that builds music from the analysis of the sound spectrum itself. He laid its foundations as early as 1969, even before the French composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, with whom the movement is most often associated.
A theorist as much as a creator, he invented notions such as “spectral scordatura” and a “plasmatic” approach to sound. His radical music sought to make audible the very interior of sounds.
The final years in Clarens and Vevey
In the mid-1990s, Radulescu settled in Switzerland: first in Clarens, then in Vevey.
He died of cancer in Paris on 25 September 2008, but it is in the Clarens cemetery that he is buried. There he joins a small community of musicians, Magaloff, Szigeti, Boller, as if the hill of Clarens had taken it upon itself to receive those whom music had brought to the lakeside.
Related places
▸Cimetière de ClarensCemeteryOpen the place →
Photo coming soonThe peaceful cemetery above Clarens where David Richards, the producer of Mountain Studios, rests.